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Interdisciplinary projects associated with the MCAW

  • Assos was visited on his Troas journey by Apostle Paulos, who crossed from here to Lesbos. In contemporary sources, the city is documented as a bishop's seat from the 5th century onwards and is still mentioned by Georgios Pachymeres in the 14th century as an important refuge for the surrounding countryside as far as the river Skamandros, which is about 40 km away. There have been no further clues as to the size and importance of the town and its infrastructure, everyday life and integration into a supra-regional trading system; the townscape and its furnishings with churches, public buildings and secular buildings have remained unexplained.

    In the first phase of the study, funded by the DFG from 2013-2018, the city was investigated within the ancient city wall. A survey made possible by extensive clearing work in 2014 and 2015 provided evidence of a complete restructuring of the city in the late 5th and 6th centuries and the relocation of the urban centre from the ancient agora to a terrace below.

    In addition, several representative individual buildings were excavated that are representative of the new city complex, such as the episcopal (?) audience hall, a tetrapylon converted into a chapel, a storage building on the same terrace, several larger residential complexes as well as a building complex used as an guest house (xenodochion) at the west gate. The documentation of the archaeological features as well as the evaluation of the finds brought to light in these areas, so far without comparison for this period, make it possible to establish a continuous sequence of pottery and small finds, which complements the investigation of the buildings chronologically and socio-culturally. According to these investigations, the newly constructed early Byzantine city was inhabited until the end of the 7th century, perhaps even into the early 8th century.

    In a second, still pending period of investigation, the shift of the Middle Byzantine city towards the northern hillside or outside the walled city will now be researched in the coming years. The so-called Ayazma church in the ancient necropolis northwest of the city was rebuilt again in the 11th century and used as a cemetery church at least until the first quarter of the 12th century. But where are the residential areas of the Middle Byzantine city located? Clues are provided by pottery finds and architectural remains in the valley south of the Ayazma church and on a hill to the southwest of it, as well as in the area of the present-day Turkish village. These remains are to be documented by an intensive extra-urban survey with accompanying building surveys. Another research desideratum in the urban development history of Assos is the castron on the acropolis, which can be proven to have been used until the 15th century. However, the date at which the castle complex with its towers was built has not yet been clarified. Moreover, the use of the castron is largely unknown. How should the mention of the refuge castle by Georgios Pachymeres be interpreted? Was the castle with its two terraces completely covered with dwellings and huts? How were the houses equipped, what standard of living can be expected? What was everyday life like in the Kastron?

    The studies on Byzantine Assos are intended to trace the transformation processes from the evolved late antique city complex to the medieval castron. The focus is on the upheavals within the development of the settlement and the associated transformations in the cityscape and in material culture. Our investigations provide insights into the everyday life of a Byzantine city that cannot be gleaned from written sources.

    The processes of change repeatedly discussed for Late Antiquity and the early Byzantine period, culminating in the question of "decline or change", can be optimally studied precisely under these conditions, and thus offer impulses for supra-regional urban research in the Byzantine period.

  • Archaeological fieldwalking in the counties of Ezine, Ayvacık and Bayramiç (Çanakkale province / Turkey)

    Where and how did the people of the 3rd to 15th centuries AD live in the province? In this survey project, carried out with the official approval of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the legacies of this period in the counties of Ezine, Bayramiç and Ayvacık (administrative district of Çanakkale / Turkey) are being examined. For this purpose, all discoverable urban and village settlement structures, in addition to roads, paths, bridges and harbours as well as economic resources (quarries and quarrying, evidence of ore or mineral extraction or other indications of economic foundations of settlements) will be registered and documented by surface surveys. Since the study area is very large (2832 km2) and dense vegetation often makes ground visibility very difficult, a combination of extensive and intensive surveying was chosen, which - judging by the results obtained so far - promises the greatest possible success. Interestingly, the area encompasses a wide variety of natural areas (steep and flat coasts, barren hinterland to karst landscapes, fertile plains, river courses, mountain regions), in which a differentiated settlement pattern can be expected.

    According to current research, the region lost its importance from Late Antiquity onwards. In the known maps of supra-regional traffic connections, the Troas is therefore outside the important routes; the traffic routes on land "cut off" the Troas with the connection Adramytteion - Kyzikos from the major trade metropolises. Even the important sea route to Constantinople is not supposed to touch the Troas according to popular opinion, since in the reconstruction maps the islands of Lesbos to the south and Tenedos to the west were bypassed by the ships, which does not even include the Pauline city of Alexandreia Troas.

    The results of the surface survey obtained so far paint a completely different picture, which now shows the Troad as densely built-up. The settlement density obviously surpassed even modern times, as generally around three to five Byzantine settlements are grouped around a modern Turkish village. Thus, since the beginning of the survey in 2006, 214 settlements and 49 spolia sites have been newly discovered and recorded in nine campaigns, in addition to other sites such as quarries, ore deposits, mills and roads. In addition, there are five bishop's sees in the survey area, including Assos, which are being explored, and several fortified towns and castles, including the so-called treasure house of the Lascarids, Astryzion.

    The Byzantine settlements were obviously quite well equipped; the architectural sculpture found in or near the sites often had a capital city quality. Not infrequently, even small, remote villages had contacts with Constantinople, Greece or even more distant regions, which can be demonstrated by the surface finds. Often, the economic foundations of the settlements can also be recorded, such as harbour facilities, salt or alum mining fields, quarries or evidence of ore mining and processing, wine and olive presses, as well as the roads that connected the individual settlements.

    The aim of the survey is to comprehensively record all legacies of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods in order to create as complete a picture as possible of life in the province outside of the previously known sources.

  • The Thyssen Foundation funded an unusual form of interdisciplinary cooperation in 2015-2016 (https://www.uni-marburg.de/fb10/klassphil/aktuelles/news/alias.2014-05-20.8295812147): Prof. Dr. Sabine Föllinger, a Greek scholar from Marburg, and Prof. Dr. Evelyn Korn, a microeconomist from Marburg, conducted a joint project entitled "Economic Action in Plato. An Institutional Economic Analysis of Plato's Ideal State", they systematically re-examined Plato's economic considerations against the background of current economic theory.

    The starting point was the observation that the way Plato describes and standardises the economic action of the individual as part of social action in his ideal state conceptions Politeia and Nomoi is comparable to the approach of institutional economics. This is because institutional economics examines the question of which extra-individual factors ('institutions'), such as legal regulations, social norms and also ethical values, influence the actions of individuals.

    The project was thus able to counter the marginalisation of Plato's economic ideas that had prevailed for a long time. It has shown that the requirements in view of which Plato develops his thoughts on economic action are quite comparable with the problems facing modern economics. In both cases, it is a question of which rules a rule-maker designs based on certain objectives ('prosperity' / 'social justice' / 'happiness') and on the assumption of certain behavioural patterns of the actors.

    Topics that were at the centre of the project were: What image of man does Plato represent, and how can this be related to the economic reference image of homo economicus and its extensions? Which individual regulations does Plato design in his theoretical drafts, and how do they work together? In what way does his detailed depiction of the interaction of internal and external motivation correspond to the approaches of modern institutional economic analysis, which analyses the relationship between social framework conditions and individual behaviour?

    The two researchers developed the project within the framework of the focus "Ancient Economy" of the 'Marburg Center Ancient World', in which, among other things, the application of the theory of New Institutional Economics to research on the ancient economy played a role.

  • The project of the Marburg Department of Greek Studies (project leader: Prof. Dr. Sabine Föllinger, collaborator: Thomas Busch) is researching Aristotle's writing 'De generatione animalium (On the Origin of Living Beings)' as part of a project funded by the DFG.

    Aristotle (4th century BC) is considered the founder of biology as a separate discipline with scientific pretensions. He not only conducted extensive individual zoological research, but also tried to explain why certain general phenomena in biology occur at all. Thus his writing "On the Origin of Living Things" is dedicated to explaining the processes of procreation and heredity. These were - we are in a time long before the discovery of the female ovum and the explanatory approaches made possible by modern genetics - the subject of lively discussion by various scientists, including the pre-Socratic philosophers and the authors of the Hippocratic writings. In discussion with these, Aristotle develops a large-scale draft theory that is still fascinating today.

    Yet despite the scholarly importance of the script, it has not yet been studied in detail. This is the gap that the Graecist project fills. It is dedicated to a precise analysis of the argumentation used by Aristotle and its location in the Aristotelian theory of science as well as its linguistic and stylistic representations. The heterogeneous style of the writing is striking: Discursive passages alternate with descriptive accounts. Short sketches are juxtaposed with rhetorically sophisticated passages. One starting point for the study is the unresolved literary status of the Aristotelian Pragmatia as a whole: research on ancient scientific prose in recent years has clearly shown that the so-called doctrinal writings seem to defy characterisation by simple categories such as 'literary vs. non-literary' or 'art vs. factual prose'. The project is thus part of the international research debate on the emergence of scientific literature in ancient Greece.

    Further information (in German)